Tell me why - part 4

Read Part One | Part Two | Part Three

It turns out part four is the hardest part to write. It's the part where my childhood intersects my adult life and my relationships - romantic and platonic - intersect my relationship to music. Talk about the crossroads, baby. So, I'm writing and writing and writing and the post is getting longer and longer and longer and the whole time I'm thinking PAGING DR. FREUD! PAGING DR. FREUD! When I was finished writing, I had to start cutting. Some of it I just don't want to share. A lot of it is just more about me than you'll ever want to know. Funny, the editing took a lot longer than the writing, and the post is still too long, but I guess this is the part I need to tell. So, finally, here it is: part four. After this, I move on to a (hopefully) weekly schedule that tells the tale of what it's like, at 40-something, to start singing the blues.

The one really important point I want to make is that my dad never made the sound he wanted to make in the world. He made some sounds, but never the one he really wanted to make. The really good one. The one he'd always be remembered for. And I never sang my song for him.

As I got older, I started to really hear music again. I started to want to play. And sing. So, with my then-husband's help and support, I picked up a guitar and started to learn chords. Here I am, my first time on stage playing music. It was at the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.
That's my friend Tim Chandler, aka, TC. He's one of those kinds of friends - the kind without whom you're absolutely certain your life would be unsurvivable. We're doing Pirate Looks At Forty by Jimmy Buffet. I was about 41 then. He's doing all the singing.

I wanted to sing but I was scared to open my mouth. I had tried to sing at home. My ex, a guitar player of some note, would try to get me to do background vocals when he was recording some new tune he'd written. But when I sang for him, it was never good. Never right. Never whatever. But I didn't know what I was doing wrong or how to make it right. And let's just say his criticism was light years from anything you could call constructive.

I did know one thing: singing felt good. Really good.

So I started closet singing. Not singing in the actual closet, which would be silly not to mention dark and claustrophobic, but singing when my husband wasn't around to give me that look, the one that shut my mouth and kept it closed. I started singing while playing my guitar, a Canadian Godin that I absolutely love.
That's me with my Godin (and my black roots! Get thee to a salon, girl!). My friend took this pic while I was concentrating too much to know he was snapping the pic. I was learning country tunes and blues tunes that meant something to me. Songs that spoke to my growing certainty that my life as I knew it was slowly disintegrating. Songs like Patty Loveless' Cheap Whiskey and Jimmy Rogers' That's All Right and the traditional It Hurts Me Too.

Finally and predictably, my life as I knew it did indeed disintegrate. After eighteen years, I was suddenly single. I was in a daze. I was heartbroken. I was lost. TC would come over and I'd cook and we'd talk and sometimes play and sometimes I'd even sing. Sometimes I'd go out and pretend I was having fun. Then I'd come home and cry and sing and play guitar. Not the Godin--the ex took that--but my acoustic.

So picture this: There I was, single after eighteen years, alone in my house (without even my beloved Godin) my dad's letters scattered across the tile, my ex-husband's voice still ringing in my ears, playing and singing those heartbroke songs. Something was happening to me but I didn't know it at the time.

Then I threw a birthday party for my friend Renee at her bar, Ace's. That's Renee above in her birthday tiara and "kiss me" button. It was Labor Day weekend 2007. We hired TC and a bunch of other musicians to stage a jam where everyone could get up and play for Renee at her birthday.

TC was running the jam and he got me up to play guitar. I'd had a few Coronas by then. He tried to convince me to sing the song with him, but look where the microphone is. I was still convinced I'd peel paint off the walls with my voice if I sang.

But he kept trying to get me to sing and even called me out over the microphone, which got all my friends in on the act. Finally, at the perfect intersection of Corona and encouragement, I stepped on stage to sing in public for the first time in my life.
I was singing That's All Right by Jimmy Rogers (not the one that goes "that's alright baby" but the one that goes "I know you love another girl, and that's all right.") Do I look scared? I was terrified. Terr-i-fied! But that was at the beginning of the song.

Here I am at the end of the song. I was feelin' that shit. My friends (being my friends) loved it, of course. It was rough. And when I say "rough," I mean awful. I kept running out of air and I was off-pitch a lot. But my heart flowed into that microphone as easily as water flows downhill. And that's what they heard. That's what they felt. They felt what I felt.

And I was making the sound I wanted to make in the world. The sound I'd wanted to make for my dad. The sound I needed to make for myself.

And that's why, almost a year later, I'm still singing the blues.

Next week: how I got in my first band.